Because most of the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia were launched across the Adriatic Sea from bases on Italian soil, the most demanding event for Italy in 1999 was the conflict in Kosovo. Italy mounted its biggest humanitarian relief operation abroad to deal on the spot with many of the refugees who fled from their country to neighbouring Albania. Politically, Italy continued to be governed by a centre-left coalition flawed by internal dissension. Unusually, a recurrent theme during the year was the behaviour of aircraft.

When in late March, after the collapse of negotiations with Slobodan Milosevic (seeBiographies), the NATO allies began the “Allied Force” bombing campaign aimed at securing the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo, the planes took off from 11 bases throughout Italy as well as from allied aircraft carriers. With approximately 40 planes committed, Italy’s air effort was second only to that of the United States. The role assigned to the Italian planes was not unaffected by political sensitivity in Rome to reservations voiced by communists and Greens in the government. An Italian NATO spokesman in Vincenza said initially that the aircraft were involved in “integrated defense,” neutralizing threats from surface-to-air missiles, for instance, but later embarked upon “air interdiction,” attacking ammunition dumps, artillery sites, and the like. Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema told the nation in late March that military action had been “a hard but inevitable choice” for Italy, but it “had to and has to play its part in halting the genocide in progress [in Kosovo].” Italy deployed some 2,000 ground troops in Macedonia and another 2,000 in Albania ready for the Kosovo peacekeeping force, which, as the year ended, included some 5,000 Italian troops and 220 paramilitary police.

Italy also had 1,400 men in Albania, where in late March it launched “Operation Rainbow,” a major drive to help cope with an avalanche of refugees escaping from Kosovo. Organized by the Civilian Protection Department of the Interior Ministry, 3,792 civilian volunteers aided by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies set up and ran 10 big refugee camps across Albania and by the end of July were said to have housed or assisted some 60,000 homeless. Religious institutions supervised many small welcome centres, and the Italian public responded massively to appeals for donations.

In May three Italian fishermen were injured and their boat damaged when a bomb fished up in their nets from the Adriatic exploded. The incident led to the disclosure of the existence of six NATO drop zones, the locations of which were shifted periodically, where pilots in difficulty after missions over Yugoslavia could dump unneeded ordnance. Following Italian protests, NATO acknowledged that it had failed to inform Rome of the zones’ existence and apologized. Italian and NATO minesweepers later rid the sea bottom of 127 bombs.

Airplanes were at the root of tension between Italy and the U.S. in another matter. In March a U.S. Marine Corps court acquitted of manslaughter charges the pilot of a jet that had sliced through the cables of a ski lift in the Italian Alps in early 1998, causing 20 people to plunge to their death. The Italian public was outraged, and Prime Minister D’Alema made strong representations to U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton during a meeting in Washington, D.C. The American embassy in Rome said the pilot, Richard Ashby, was later jailed for six months and given a dishonourable discharge for having obstructed justice during the investigation. The embassy reported that in April the U.S. and Italy had formally agreed that henceforth all NATO training flights would require prior clearance by Italian authorities to ensure compliance with Italian security requirements.

An Italian civilian airliner that had mysteriously crashed into the sea north of Sicily in 1980, killing all 81 people on board, was found during the year to have been at the centre of a top-secret “act of war” involving Libyan MiGs and so-far-unidentified NATO fighters in a Mediterranean air battle. The Itavia DC-9 airliner was found to have unknowingly acted as a “shield” for an unspecified fighter flying beneath it to avoid detection by radar. In a 3,000-page indictment made public in September, nine Italian air force officers, including four generals, were committed to trial, accused of high treason and suppression of evidence. The indictment, handed in after an eight-year investigation, speculated that the DC-9 had been hit by violent turbulence or a missile during a conflict, the nature of which was not made clear. The judge found that there had been a grave military cover-up, and the Italian press doubted that the truth would ever come out.

In politics a new president assumed office in May after elections in Parliament. Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, former governor of the Bank of Italy, was known chiefly as the man who as treasury minister under the preceding government had done the most to engineer Italy’s entry into the European Monetary Union.

Italian voters made their disgruntlement felt in June elections for the European Parliament, from which the opposition Forza Italia party, headed by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, emerged as the strongest party of all in national terms, scooping up 25.2% of the vote. The government coalition’s leading component, the Democrats of the Left (DS), lost ground, polling 17.4%. Then two weeks later, in runoff ballots for town councils, the left wing also lost Bologna, the northern model “red city,” a stronghold and showplace of the communists and their successors for 54 years. It was seen as the end of an era. The new mayor, Forza Italia’s man, was Giorgio Guazzaloca, a 55-year-old butcher. Ds leader Walter Veltroni called the victory “a major and stinging defeat,” showing the left had “serious problems.” The most obvious of these, according to commentators, was the coalition’s fragmentation. This fragmentation was evident on December 18 when a defection by two small parties in the federal coalition forced the prime minister to resign. Within less than a week, however, D’Alema had formed a new government, which was approved by Parliament.

In September an assize court in the Umbrian city of Perugia, after 162 hearings, cleared Giulio Andreotti, several times Italian prime minister, of having ordered the murder 20 years earlier of an “inconvenient” journalist, Mino Pecorelli. Evidence was mainly based on the word of Mafia turncoats. In Palermo another court, after a four-year trial, acquitted Andreotti on charges of criminal association with the Mafia. Five-time prime minister Amintore Fanfani, whose centre-left Christian Democratic Party (now defunct) dominated Italian politics during the 1950s and ’60s, died in November. (SeeObituaries.)

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